The C&S Wholesale Services warehouse and office in Baldwin. | Google
Published on May 2, 2025 at 1:17 pm
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C&S Wholesale Services plans to close the warehouse that supplies Winn-Dixie stores and lay off 490 people in Baldwin.
All employees at the sprawling facility at 15500 W. Beaver St. will be laid off starting July 4, the company told the state in a notice under the Worker Adjustment Notification Act.
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C&S Wholesale Services “will be ceasing operations at its distribution center,” the letter says. The 490 employees will be laid off permanently.
The layoffs include 132 drivers, the letter says.
Questioned late Thursday about reports that the warehouse was closing, C&S Wholesale Grocers spokesperson Lauren La Bruno stated that it was not.
“I want to be clear that the reports on us closing our Jacksonville facility are incorrect. I will not be commenting further on this matter,” La Bruno said.
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La Bruno said C&S “remains steadfast in our transformation strategy to drive long-term growth.”
La Bruno did not respond to other inquiries by Friday afternoon.
C&S was founded in 1918 in Massachusetts and acquired the contract for the Worcester-based Big D supermarket chain in 1958, beginning its transformation into a larger company, its website states.
By 2003, it began servicing other supermarket chains across the country, including Hawaii and California. In 2014, it acquired the assets of Associated Wholesalers Inc. and Grocers Supply, expanding into Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Houston.
Doing business as C&S Wholesale Grocers, it is now one of the largest wholesale grocery supply companies in the U.S., according to FreightWaves, a price reporting agency focused on the global freight market. It supplies more than 7,500 independent supermarkets, chain stores, military bases and institutions in the Midwest, South and Northeast, according a Jan. 7 news release on BusinessWire.
C&S also acquired Southeastern Grocers and 170 Winn-Dixie and Harveys stores in February from discount grocer Aldi, a German company with U.S. offices in Batavia, Illinois. Aldi had bought Winn-Dixie and Harveys stores from Jacksonville-based Southeastern Grocers a year and a half earlier.
The first news that C&S would close the Baldwin facility came in a Facebook post April 29 on the About Baldwin page. A woman stated that her father had been told the warehouse “is shutting down, Aldi is taking over — and they won’t be keeping any of the current staff.”
“My dad has worked there as a truck driver for 18 years. Like so many others, he’s shown up day in and day out, and now over 500 people — our friends, neighbors, and family — will be out of a job in summer,” the woman wrote.
